Xavier Becerra was the worst Biden cabinet member. He is why health care premiums increased so quickly. He’s dumb, lazy, and ignorant.

The discourse on academic political bias focuses a lot on people who are overtly activist, but the problem runs much deeper than that. I'm often struck by how even smart academics who buy the ideal of value-free science fail to seriously reflect on their own biases.

Syracuse announced a financial deficit this week after missing their enrollment target. They cite demographics geopolitics, but the answer is much simpler: There are 5.7k higher ed institutions in the US, charging way too much for something that is worth less than ever

Beyond that, aren't lions more about the planes and bushlands than the jungles?

Counterpoint: Vaping Rights are Giant Statue Justice!

This is what makes me doubt the idea of “IQ” as a meaningful construct. I work in elite academia and honestly don’t see a lot of variation in raw intellectual horsepower, either among academics or in comparing academics to non-academics. 1/

Since @FDATobacco "deemed" nicotine vapes to be "tobacco products," in 2016, its every action has resulted in reducing adult smokers' options to quit.

I have no idea where Paraguay is

Lots and lots of liberal are ambivalent in ways that neither liberals nor conservatives give a good account of because conservatives don't understand and have no incentive to be charitable and because liberals are caught in a web of self-serving and self-deluding evasion.

Sure would be great if we as a society were willing to talk about individual issues individually instead of everything being "package deals"

There is no way a single person can spend a billion dollars, let alone a trillion.

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named. The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river. The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn. Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound. "Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever. It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin. "Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather. I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet. In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair. And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge. You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain. The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste. I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind. Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again. "Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up. Discipline is a journey.

If I cure cancer I will get very rich. And a bunch of people on this site will apparently find my sudden wealth outrageous.